Dark Echo

development of the town. There was lots of information on the great maritime disaster that occurred when the crew of the Southport lifeboat went to the aid of the stricken vessel Mexico. There was nothing whatsoever in the library about Jane Boyte.

After an hour and a half of searching without result, Suzanne decided that she would go for coffee. She crossed the road from the library to the west side of Lord Street, where the shops were arrayed, then turned right and after a block came to a Costa coffee house. Costa roasted their beans at a plant in Old Paradise Street, around the corner from the Lambeth flat she shared with Martin. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, it was a familiar, homely smell. She was a fair way from home. When she ordered her drink, there was even a photograph of the Old Paradise Street street sign in sepia as part of a montage on the wall. And, of course, that was fondly familiar, too. But as the June shadows began their slow lengthening towards dusk, she felt a very long way from home indeed.

What if Martin never came back? It was a desolate thought, and one she had tried to avoid consciously thinking, while thinking it all the while at some deeper and less disciplined level of her mind. What if they never sat down again at their corner table in the Windmill for a drink to a soundtrack of the landlord’s tearful soul? There would be no more impromptu picnics in Archbishop’s Park, no more games on balmy evenings on the tennis courts, no more shopping amid the fruit and bric-a-brac stalls of Lower Marsh, and no more browsing in the book and record shops there. What if they had shared a bed for the last time, exchanged their final intimacy? She looked around her, trying to dismiss the thought, at the young girls in their northern gaggles wearing too much make-up for the daytime and wearing generally far too few clothes. What if she never heard the familiar sound of his key in the lock ever again? If his clothes just hung, limp in the wardrobe, and the scent of him faded altogether from the pillow? It was why she was here, wasn’t it? It was why she was in this unfamiliar place. She would do everything she could to bring about his safe return. She would do anything.

She sipped coffee. She looked along the still-handsome avenue she sat in, trying to imagine Harry Spalding here. He had said he was looking forward to shopping on Lord Street. She imagined him rigged out in a summer suit and hat. It would not be seersucker and straw boater for him, though. He was Europeanised. He had drunk cocktails with Scott and sparred with Hemingway in Paris. Maybe he had been granted an audience with Gertrude Stein or the scholar madman Ezra Pound. Certainly he had been on nodding terms with the dark magician, Aleister Crowley. No; it would not have been straw and seersucker for him. It would have been slubbed silk and a pale fedora and a malacca cane to twirl in his louche search along Lord Street’s glittering windows for a diamond tiepin or an engraved silver case for his cigarettes. She could imagine him fairly well, pretty vividly. There was no absence of detail. But when she saw him walk, he did not stroll. Instead Harry Spalding moved with the lope of a predator along the pavement.

The following morning, because it was all she knew to do, Suzanne went back to the library. Her Birkdale hotel room had been comfortable enough. She had thought over breakfast about exploring the locality. It looked encouragingly unchanged. She had Jane’s old address. But she knew that she would not knock on the door and discover Jane’s daughter there, cogent at eighty and happy to reminisce. Jane Boyte had died in 1971. There had been no descendents. The internet and the fashion for the subject on television made genealogy a very easy subject to research. She had researched the descendants of a northern comic from this very region for just such a programme herself two years earlier. She was familiar from that study with the old Southport surnames. The salient facts had taken Suzanne fifteen minutes to discover. Jane’s life ended in a cul-de-sac. She had encountered in her life a great man in Michael Collins and a bad one by the name of Harry Spalding. How well she had known either of them remained to be established. But her own life seemed to have ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Such was the lot of most people. Glamour was not a quality that sustained itself, unless you were Marlene Dietrich. Unless you were Pablo Picasso.

Again, she came up with nothing at the library in Southport. After two hours of musty, futile digging she went and got her cup of coffee and sat in the shade of an umbrella at a pavement table on sun-drenched Lord Street and pondered on what to do next. Maybe she ought to go to Liverpool and examine the maritime archive at the library there. What if, as she supposed, Dark Echo had been as accident-prone in Patrick Boyte’s boatyard as it had in that owned by poor Frank Hadley? There might be something.

She sighed. She sipped cappuccino. She watched traffic for a bit, the cars predominantly that silver metallic they were everywhere nowadays, and she toyed with her Marlboro packet without opening it and lighting one. What would an accident-prone boatyard in the Liverpool of eighty years ago prove? She knew that Martin and his father were in danger. She did not need a catalogue of old accidents to prove that to her. She knew it already. What she needed was the something indefinable that her instinct had impelled her to Southport in search of. It was not a coincidence in all of this that she did what she did for a living. It was her duty and her solitary hope. And sipping coffee, and resisting the craving for nicotine, she had to do what she could now to prevent a deep and powerful hopelessness from engulfing her like the tide.

‘Mind if I sit here, love?’

Suzanne smiled into the light against which the voice was silhouetted. The honest answer was that she did, of course. In the proximity of old people, you risked conversation. And this was particularly true in the north, where she knew that complete strangers often inflicted chat on you in the way that only care in the community victims ever did back in London. Age wasn’t even a consideration. Young people here did it, too. It was an indiscriminate vice.

Martin had warned her about it, years ago. But he had not done so deliberately. Magnus Stannard did it. Magnus was from Manchester. He talked to strangers all the time. He actually engaged people he did not know and had never met in conversation. Suzanne was there on a couple of occasions when he was blatantly guilty of it.

‘What is it with your dad?’

‘What?’

‘The compulsive attention seeking.’

‘He’s an attention seeker. But it’s not compulsive.’

‘He’ll talk to anyone.’

And Martin had laughed. ‘He’s from Manchester, Suzanne. And he might be a terrible show-off. Christ knows he’s got his faults. But my dad’s never had any side.’

‘Any what?’

‘Never mind.’

Eventually, she had understood. It was why she smiled in a manner she hoped might be warm and welcoming to the old lady who had invited herself to share her table outside Costa on Lord Street in Southport in the north of England where people spoke habitually to strangers and had no side. She swivelled her eyes, surreptitiously, to right and left.

‘All taken, love.’

Which they were. Every other table was occupied by families, by shop girls on their break, by fat men sweating in suits and dragging furiously on their outlawed choice of smoke.

‘I’m truly sorry,’ Suzanne said. And she was. She stood slightly and held out her hand. ‘My name is Suzanne. I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.’

The old woman smiled. A waiter from somewhere in Eastern Europe delivered her iced coffee. So she was a regular. Of course she was. Suzanne had felt surprised at the choice of beverage and now cursed herself for her snobbery. It was a kind of bigotry. What it was, was parochial.

Harry Spalding had not been parochial.

‘You look a bit lost, love. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

Her hair had been blonde a lifetime ago. Now it was grey and tied back above the patina of tiny creases on her forehead. It was fine and thick and still abundant on her head. She wore Ray-Ban sunglasses, which she took off and put on the table. They had those old-fashioned green lenses. They had tortoiseshell frames. She put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands together and Suzanne saw that she wore a Cartier Tank wristwatch and a huge ruby eternity ring. So much for care in the community.

‘My name is Alice Daunt. I’m tempted to ask why someone so beautiful looks so crestfallen. And you are beautiful, you know, dear. You are exquisitely beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But I won’t ask.’

Suzanne nodded.